November 23, 2015

David Thompson works his way through a “social justice” “analysis” of how ethnic food is — or should be — a minefield of oppression and cultural appropriation:

Again, note the loadedness, the questions begged. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten, say, chili while convinced that said meal was an adequate distillation of the entire population of Mexico and Texas, past and present. Nor can I recall “fetishizing the sustenance of another culture.” It’s a meal, not an attempt to absorb world history or to flirt with some notional brownness. Yet this is asserted as “what happens,” as some universal fact:

Eating food from another culture in isolation from that culture’s history and also current issues mean that we’re just borrowing the pieces that are enjoyable – palatable and easily digestible.

Um, and? Isn’t that rather the point? You know, tastiness without baggage? Isn’t that what makes foreign cuisine commercially viable, a livelihood of millions? Should every visit to, say, a Pakistani restaurant entail a stern lecture on the pros and cons of European colonisation and a lifetime subscription to the fever dream of Islam? Would that aid digestion? Stated plainly, it sounds a little silly. But Ms Kuo wishes to appear concerned, deeply concerned, that people of pallor might enjoy falafel and a spot of hummus “but not understand or address the ongoing Islamophobia in the US.”

Well. I’m pretty sure that the family running my local Chinese takeaway actively encourages heathen white folk to sample their wares, regardless of whether those paying customers are intimately familiar with All Of Chinese History, and regardless of whether those customers dutifully ponder how the cooking of this particular family differs from other Chinese families, from any particular town or province, in a country as vast and sprawling as China. What they want is custom. Pretentiously agonised pseudo-sensitivity is, alas, not billable.